Friday, 5th October 2007 by James Turnbull
At the ThyssenKrupp steel mill in Bruckhausen is a fantastic image of molten slag being poured out of a slag car.
Slag is a by-product of the manufacturing of steel; an alloy produced by smelting pig iron at temperatures of 1650 °C.
The slag is poured into pits, where it is left to cool down before being recycled as aggregate for cement or concrete.
Just because it’s Friday, today’s phonetically-related random fact is that one of the other meanings of the word “slag” (used in the UK to describe a person “of loose morals”) is apparently considered the 16th most offensive word in the English language1, just above “shit”.
Wikipedia has more info on Steel manufacturing, but if you’re in a much more Friday-orientated frame of mind, then you could amuse yourself with Wikipedia’s extensive information on Profanity in all its forms!
By “English” I mean what Americans call “British English”. ↩